1 EPAC’06 Post Mortem J. Poole

EPAC06 Post Mortem, TM Trieste, March 2007, J. Poole 2 EPAC2006 – The Results 1188 papers published (from ~1550 abstracts submitted – 75% survived) Pre-press version available 7 days after the conference. The proceedings just made to fit on a CD. Definitive proceedings were on JACoW 4 weeks after the pre-press version.

EPAC06 Post Mortem, TM Trieste, March 2007, J. Poole 3 Organisational Issues Most of the SPMS functionality was exploited –Registration –Scientific programme –Editing Village system was not used –This caused some difficulties for presenting authors (and consequently the conference coordinator) but the chairman was happy Several papers were not accepted for publication

EPAC06 Post Mortem, TM Trieste, March 2007, J. Poole 4 Eiting at EPAC 2006 Basic assumption for expert editors is that they can edit an average of 35 papers per day. Started pre-conference processing Thursday AM in a building adjacent to the conference centre. High percentage of papers submitted by the deadline (Wednesday 21 June midnight)

EPAC06 Post Mortem, TM Trieste, March 2007, J. Poole 5 Paper Submission (file upload)

EPAC06 Post Mortem, TM Trieste, March 2007, J. Poole 6 Papers Processed per Day

EPAC06 Post Mortem, TM Trieste, March 2007, J. Poole 7 Processing Stats.

EPAC06 Post Mortem, TM Trieste, March 2007, J. Poole 8 Processing Performance We did not expect so many papers in the early stages of planning and but we decided to stick with our original manpower estimates for editors because this is limited by budget. Pre-conference processing was hard work for 9 editors: Thursday200 papers Friday325 papers Saturday389 papers 916(c.f. 35 papers per day per editor) Leaving enough for training of new editors Started QA early in the week and completed it before the end of the conference.

EPAC06 Post Mortem, TM Trieste, March 2007, J. Poole 9 Platforms and Software

EPAC06 Post Mortem, TM Trieste, March 2007, J. Poole 10 Processing Problems 32%Format Probs. - does not match template 24%Other 12%No Postscript File 6%Title not in uppercase 6%Font Problems 4%Bad format in references 4%A4 printed on US Paper or vice-versa 4%Unusable Files 2%Type 3 Fonts (LaTeX) 2%Footnote outside margin 1%Too many pages 1%Colour lost in figures.3%Slow Graphics.25%Blank last page.25%Multiple PS Files.2%PDF file not PS

EPAC06 Post Mortem, TM Trieste, March 2007, J. Poole 11 Acrobat Version Compatibility Save As will change Acrobat Version IF PitStop has been used. Save will usually keep the correct version but the files will not be optimised. Un-optimised file of ~23Mbyte reduced to 840kbyte with Save As Observe that some PDF1.6 files are unavoidable Conclusion Don’t worry about it, use Save As systematically and then run batch job to change Acrobat version.

EPAC06 Post Mortem, TM Trieste, March 2007, J. Poole 12 Batch Job to Change Version In Acrobat Professional: Advanced  Batch Processing  Fast Web View Select ‘Edit Sequence’ and click on ‘Output Options’ Check the PDF Optimiser and then select the ‘Settings’ button which will present you with the Optimiser settings Set up the standard JACoW settings for Acrobat 5.0 and later compatibility and the usual compression and so on. The job will run against all of the PDF files in the directory which you specify.

EPAC06 Post Mortem, TM Trieste, March 2007, J. Poole 13 Downloading the raw files Modifications to the XML dump to include the necessary command wget This data is known to the SPMS because the editor download script is used and the details of the file associated with the contribution are defined. Up till now it has been necessary to drive a script with a list of file and directory names for each paper.

EPAC06 Post Mortem, TM Trieste, March 2007, J. Poole 14 Lessons from 2006 The automatic checks made by the scripts identify many of the problems. Some problems were introduced by the use of pdfopt – this has since been suppressed since the functionality is covered by the batch job to force compatibility levels which was described earlier. The final stage (when the website is ready to be published) of opening every PDF file and displaying every page found a significant number of problems which had slipped through (Japanese fonts and corrupted thumbnails etc.) –it is a laborious step but necessary

EPAC06 Post Mortem, TM Trieste, March 2007, J. Poole 15 Conclusions The processes are mature and a professional product is produced with fewer resources. Software (Word) has become more solid and the tools at our disposal are more powerful. Editors are becoming much pickier and the appearance of the published files is becoming better –Unfortunately we cant say the same for the scientific content of the papers.